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Never Any Good News
By David Glenn Cox
I read the news today, oh boy; it seems sometimes that there just isn’t any good news. Yet there is good news behind the bad news. Each job termination, each home foreclosure adds to our numbers. We are getting a baptism by fire that hits like a bucket of ice water; any belief in all the nefarious forms of corporate propaganda is almost instantly exorcised.
My own situation isolates me. I have less than I’ve ever had in my life, and yet I have more faith that change is coming than I’ve ever had. I was walking to the drug store for coffee on Friday. I had talked to the clerk before so I felt relaxed around him. He was asking the customer in front of me if he wanted the store discount card and then if there was anything else. The customer said, “No” and “No” and “No,” then I added, “It’s Friday, the only thing he wants is his paycheck and a clear road home.”
The customer, a man in his forties, turned to me and said, “I’d settle for a paycheck, I haven’t had one of those since June.” I nodded and added, “I understand, it’s been over a year for me.” The man walked out and the clerk said, “I’m not starving but I’m hungry. Eighteen hours a week here isn’t enough to pay my bills."
Saturday I was walking to Burger King for one of their one-dollar double cheeseburgers. As I walked I passed a man on the side of the road, a sign holder for a stereo store. When I passed him he asked me for a cigarette. I replied that I didn’t smoke and mentioned that I hadn’t seen him in a while.
“Yeah,” he explained, “they’ve cut me back to two days. I had three other part time jobs but this one offered more money so I quit the other three, and then they cut me back. Good thing I’ve got my tent. I can stay with my mom when it gets too cold, but that’s four hours from here on the bus."
My tiny little actual world of perhaps one square mile which is filled with struggle and unemployment is also filled with the warmth of understanding. These struggling people understand and relate to each other and are the proselytes of a new America. I read the blog forums and everywhere are the same stories of unemployment, foreclosure and struggle. Then I read the news, the hard news. I read the business news because they have a different audience so they have a different set of lies. I listen to and read what my government says and what I don’t hear is understanding. I hear hype and spin and, prior to Brown winning in Massachusetts, an administration that barely mentioned unemployment.
I see an administration whose mortgage rescue plan is an abject failure and a President who talks about it as a stunning success. The President’s new budget will call for an increase in funding for the energy department (nukes) and offer $25 billion in direct aid to the states. Two weeks ago California asked for $20 billion to close their shortfall, so splitting $25 billion between fifty states will go no further to solve that state's problems than eighteen hours a week at the drug store. The administration will also allow states to issue “Build America” bonds. More borrowing to fix the problems of not enough revenue because of unemployment and falling wages.
I grew up in a family full of survivors from the Great Depression so I have a strange sense of deja vu. I’d heard the stories about Hoover’s cracked wheat and his program to send seed packets to starving farmers in the dust bowl, oblivious to the reason that they were hungry in the first place was because their crops had failed. They needed food, not seeds; they were eating dogs and cats but the administration was against direct aid for fear that the people would become demoralized.
I heard stories of FDR’s first inaugural address where grown men teared up and wept when FDR blasted the big banks and acknowledged the problems of working people. Not nuanced attacks but direct, straight to the heart of the matter attacks.
“Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.
“More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.
“Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This Nation asks for action, and action now. Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously.”
Here was a guy that got it. Finally someone who talked about real people who were really suffering with a message of confidence and determination. The press was no less Republican in his day than Fox news is today.
“Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.
“But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.
“True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”
There is a great disaffection for both political parties at this time. The tea baggers are disaffected on the right and the liberals have abandoned the President, leaving him to lie down with blue dogs and get up with fleas. Across the political spectrum the American population feels abandoned by their leaders.
A political void will be filled. “Physical strength can never permanently withstand the impact of spiritual force.” So I remain hopeful that change will come; that a leader will arise like an FDR who will understand that we cannot continue on our current course. Who will understand that we cannot build a better economy without building things and paying decent wages. That without decent jobs for our people every other program is futile.
A leader who will understand what Hubert Humphrey once said: “The President is the people’s lobbyist.”
A leader with the strength to strangle the banks and call them to heal, and a policy to make the American economy work for the benefit of the population and not just the corporations. A leader that realizes, like FDR did, that the only other alternative is dark and bitter and unfathomable.
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